Name: From Legacy to Leading-Edge: KeyBank’s 9-Month Digital Overhaul
Uploaded: 2026-05-12T18:16:15.657Z
Duration: 1 h 8 s
Description: From Legacy to Leading-Edge: KeyBank’s 9-Month Digital Overhaul

Transcript for "From Legacy to Leading-Edge: KeyBank’s 9-Month Digital Overhaul": Welcome to your virtual event. Before we get started, we'll walk you through the features of our webinar platform so you have a seamless experience. This button allows you to turn the audio on and off. Please note, by default, the button will be toggled to mute, so you'll need to turn it on at the start of the session. If you'd like to proceed with closed captioning, click here. When it's time for q and a, engage with speakers by typing your questions into this window. You may be asked to participate in a live poll during the discussion. Once the question is presented, you can share your thoughts by selecting the response that aligns with how you feel. When the session is over, click here to exit. At the end of the webinar, we would appreciate your feedback on how this session went. Greetings. I would like to welcome everyone to our, program today entitled from legacy to leading edge, KeyBank's nine month digital overhaul. My name is Mike Sis. I'm with American Banker, and I will be your moderator today. Our sponsor for our program is OutSystems, and our host is American Banker. I have a couple of quick housekeeping notes I just wanna share with you before we dive in. Today's slides and the full recording will be shared with you, within a week following, the the event today. And although we we're not gonna have time to take questions from the audience during today's program, but we really encourage you to ask questions. Put those into the queue as they come to mind, and we will get back to you after the program. We'd very much, very much like to hear from you, so please ask away. And now just for a little context, for our discussion today, the dilemma facing many of you is is familiar. How do you innovate at the speed of the market without disrupting the core systems that have powered your bank for decades? To answer that, we're looking at a 200 year old institution that did exactly that. KeyBank's wealth management division replaced a decades old process with a digital first platform called Account Central launched in under nine months with zero critical effects. And joining me to tell a story today we have, two, excellent speakers. Happy to have them here. Mike Reynolds is business technology executive at KeyBank. Mike leads the intelligent automation organization. He is responsible for enterprise low code adoption, RPA, and the delivery of Gen AI solutions. Operating under agile principles, his team, his teams have delivered over 600 automated processes, creating a digital workforce that executes the daily volume of 500 employees. A frequent speaker on hyperautomation and AI, Mike is a two time recipient of the KeyBank Chairman Award and the Mike Cozzens Inspiration Award. And, again, very, just delighted to have, Mike with us here today. And, also, we have, JB Vincieli, VP of product management at OutSystems. JB is a veteran product executive with over twenty years of experience scaling global AI and SaaS platforms. He recently architected a global AI foundations team leading the strategy for GenAI and agentic organization products to bridge technical innovation with product adoption. And before that, he created several game changing products in a low code and automation space. So, before, JD kicks off the discussion, I'd just like to make a couple quick, comments about, the, the the foundation that KeyBank chose for this overhaul. OutSystems is the AI development platform built for the enterprise. Large organizations across 70 plus countries rely on OutSystems to build and deliver innovative digital services, core processes, and customer experiences across diverse technical and regulatory environments. OutSystems provides one unified platform for the full AI development life cycle. Teams of any size and technical depth can use OutSystems to build, deploy, and manage AI apps and agents quickly and cost effectively without compromising reliability and security. So, JV, with, with that kind of scale behind the platform, how are you seeing banks navigate the current fast moving landscape? Thank you, Mike. So it won't be a surprise, I think, for anyone on the call that currently banks are under huge amount of pressure. You have the microeconomic uncertainty. You have AI competition and AI in active competition as well. You have margin pressure, so it's it's a lot of things. And, frankly, right now, in your mobile app or in your, web services on on the web is not like a differentiator. Right? The new thing is agentic banking, and the AI is not just answering question. It's actually acting on behalf of the customer. So it's basically where, you know, customer are getting more value. So the market is not just changing. The value customers are wanting from our banks today is is already changing. But there is a gap. Right? So every customers we we we met, there is a a huge difference between what they are trying to achieve and where they are. So at the at this stage, it's it's clear that there is another price gap. And the first thing is a tool for billing Advantiq are fragmented. Right? There is not a single platform where you can actually dig for your agent. You need to design them. You need to put them together. You need to train your other content. You need to train on the content. You need to deploy. You need to analyze. You need to monitor. So it's a bunch of different tools that you need to put together. The The second thing I'm the most, probably undoing, and we're gonna chat a lot with Mike about that is legacy core banking. And it's preventing innovation. Right? Let's let's name the elephant in the room. It's been for a while. And you can't move at the the speed of AI anymore. Right? So how you can actually, today, try to innovate in in that rhythm? And the last piece is a tension between, AI and the speed of AI and, regulation. So there is lots of regulation coming in, and you can't really unleash a black black box AI anymore. Right? You need to have security in a audit. You need to have compliance baking into the system. So a lot of things to think about, for banks. And so when you close this enterprise gap, and we're gonna chat with Mike how he did that. You have really, transformation, for banks, and it sounds three pillars that we say usually. First one is margin protection. So by deploying agentic loan origination, for example, having AI doing heavy manual tasks like document capture or, you know, your customers, you cut decision time. The the cost to serve is drastically reduced. The The second thing is market share growth, because you're basically trying to compete against the fintech. And by delivering pixel perfect experience for your customers, having a mobile first experience, having hyper personalization, keep those customers with you so they don't go to the competition. And the first one is being audit what I call audit ready. So it's built in security, trust, governance, compliance. You can actually deploy your AI that you can trust and that customer can actually use and interact with. That's fully logged, trustable, and secure by design. And that's basically how we think about, what I describe at, at Aotearstem. Right? Our platform is unified, agile, and enterprise product. So unified means you have all the building blocks to create your experiences into one platform. Agile is you can actually move at the speed of AI with even using your legacy core system and not letting you that as a train. And we have tons of customers, and we're gonna chat with Michael with a great, success story he has, that have deployed, out system mission critical business processes. So let's go to, basically, the real world now. And, Mike, we're gonna chat about, you know, your experience on how you deploy that massive project. And the first question I have for you is, you know, KeyBank is a 200 years old institution. So it doesn't scream innovation, when we say that. And, how did you look at the, you know, the onboarding process for wealth management? What was the primary barrier for creating a friction like experience for your for your users? Well, JB, as you can expect, a very manual process, reliant on email and even what signature documents for, you know, customer or representatives of the customer had to be, you know, in an office. When I think of integrating with legacy systems, it can be notoriously difficult. Teams, may have challenges with integrations, the security between various systems, and and the data can be very siloed, in those handoffs. So when we moved, to OutSystems to build a dedicated onboarding tool, we knew we could bridge some of those gaps by running in parallel and putting together some of those activities to to automate the act to automate the the process more end to end. Yeah. That makes sense. When we think about those legacy system banks, when I talk to customers, The first thing that we usually are uncovering in this is what I call the future of no. Right? Well, we can't do it. It's it's too risky, or, that's gonna take years to get there. We don't want to touch because it's a black box. We don't know what's behind. What's, how you you dealt with that situation? Yeah. Well, you nailed it. It's a huge factor. You cannot dismiss it. Every institution wants to feel like they're change ready, but the first barrier is always that data layer. How do things synchronize between the different systems? You call one thing, you know, a client over here, a customer over here. How's the relationship between the, maybe, the business entities? So, another factor I'll throw out to you, the documents. Trying to get a variety of documents out of email, from relationships managers directly to that client can be challenging because you've always done it a certain way. And then when I think of digitizing our documents, all of a sudden, now we have capabilities in the branch where a lot of these branches have iPads. You can do things over your phone and then instantly, have that deal moving forward, collecting those documents across a variety of, you know, people, whether it's a a spouse, or an accountant, or, you know, a bookkeeper that may have this. So, you know, turning that cumbersome, set of manual tasks into a seamless digital first interaction, for both our clients and our team, to to interact day to day, that that's where we started to get the momentum. Awesome. That's, that's a great success with, with those legacy system. It's always always a challenge. So when we think about the, you know, the yes, then we're gonna go ahead, then we're gonna innovate. You managed to stand up physically that new platform in nine months, which is, you know, incredible, in the world of of banking. Right? How did you move that fast? Yeah. So yep. You're right. It's a herculean effort because all of a sudden, we have a new platform, new vendors. We wanna make sure that we've got all the security in place to keep clients safe as well as ourselves. So I I think it came down to just a few technical strategies. Learning our integrations, we had a little over 20 systems, to map out and and determine, hey, what are the fields we're gonna send for, you know, whether whether it was an OFAC kind of check or, you know, know your customer type activities down to, hey. We need to go to the servicing system that sets up these accounts. Getting all that on the table and then deciding, are there existing APIs that we're confident in? Notice I said confident. Do we need to combine, our maybe a robotic process automation strategy, with, OutSystems local capabilities and call bots from a push of a button? But, after lying all that up, we were able to execute on a true hyper automation strategy. So building that from scratch also had some luxuries too. You know, there were no preconceived notions of the past other than, hey, it comes in via email. We don't know exactly when to to manage this. You know, the client may think that they started two weeks ago versus we didn't get their documents, until, you know, yesterday. So those kind of ambiguities on how long it's taking were removed. And then, hey, I'll just kinda hit on documents one more time. It was when you think of a central place for both clients and our own people to view documents, we know when all of those have all those documents have been accumulated, the right versions, in one place. So that can make a seamless move from a previous, you know, wealth entity managing money to to key, so that our clients can have full access, to their money on day one or near day one. Yeah. That makes sense. And and when I hear you saying that, I I think the one of the key thing was really to reuse the system and business processes that we are working and just wrap the new out system application on top. So you don't for everything, you don't start from scratch. You actually go faster by wrapping your legacy systems, and then you can design that pixel perfect experience for your users. That's that's awesome. I've seen that at a few customer as well, and it's, it's actually very powerful to achieve that mindset of so the legacy system is preventing us to do something. We are serious. Now it's an accelerator, and then with our system, we can actually go faster. Yeah. Yeah. So let's start about, a bit about account, sample. So you launch that. If you are to, you know, pick, you know, the the key results and the impact on both the customers and the staff, how you will describe, basically, the results of the application? Yeah. Yeah. When I think of, you know, what we were improving, it's it's definitely, hey. We're focused heavily on DDA and IMT accounts, which sounds like simple activities onboarding an account, but there's lots of permutations. In fact, we have 73 varieties or permutations of this account, and and each of those require onboarding in a different way. So you trigger one field and then another field changes and, the activities get get pretty involved. So that's something that we never really tackled before. When you think of the manual process, each individual kinda had that in their head. So extracting that from their head, putting that into business logic in OutSystems, we've never had that before. So we could start and initiate the process with a series of emails, to our client, and then executing, on those documents instead of our relationship managers continually following up and say, hey. Did you receive this document? Oh, what's what's the holdup? Can I help you? Now the conversation is really, hey. Everything's at your hands. You have a document checklist. You have examples of what you need to to onboard. So just the ability to maybe take a little more hands off approach and do self-service for our clients, I think that was an evolution in the process. And then when I think of just the flow of the application, seen it all over the years, I have seen a lot of attempts at low code. And some of them, the guardrails are just so tight that the screens look, mechanical. Right? They they all look the same. They all have, maybe a clunky feel. Without systems, we eliminated that. And, you know, I think you've alluded to it earlier, just that clean, crisp, simple, feel for our, for our clients, and then having a preview of exactly what the client sees for our relationship managers so that they can do see exactly what the client sees and then administrative features, things like that that we need to execute on the deal, build side by side. Yeah. And so that that process so when you pick that process, you don't you didn't just map the existing processes. Right? You basically or reinvented, the process as you went moving to our system. Right? Yeah. So this was a transformation effort. We brought in all of our industry kind of partners and said, hey, where is KeyBank, in the in the digital kind of world of of wealth? And we weren't very far compared to many of our peers. So now we're we're accelerating that movement. And, when I think of just the existing kind of processes that we've had, I wouldn't say we trashed them all, but, you know, moving from email, from what signature, you know, establishing those procedures and get getting compliance to, see the change as a benefit and then reducing our risk became apparent. Yeah. It it was. Every disclosure statement had a signature. If there were any changes, had to, you know, go get the initials. When you go to a fully digital kind of solution, at that point, everything's documented, the changes that are occurring, and you get those digital signatures, in volume. Yeah. And how how did you so is the, the automation on compliance check contribute to that volume? I assume you did not have extra budget to add headcounts in the branch to, you know, do that work. So how that impact the automation impact that, that basically picks that piece of the process? Yeah. Oh, you you get a great point here. So I would say early on adoption, maybe we had 40% of applications coming through because we still have the paper process coming, you know, side by side. And then it was interesting, we start to see a pivot after three, four months of usage. Right? Now all of a sudden, everybody's like, hey, I can hit this button and I will go get my, you know, know your customer, the OFAC checks, all these kind of workflows happen behind the scenes, that we have all the documents in place. Those kind of checks are now automated and easier to do than they were in the old world. And I think that's the critical piece. Had to be easier to do than the old way or at least perceive that. Right? And so all of a sudden, now you've got a click of a button instead of sending an email, following up with another department. Hey. Did you get this? Oh, when are you going to be done? The SLAs are already predetermined. You can see when things were sent. If someone's out of the office, now all of a sudden, you're not trying to get into their email to see the status of a deal. You're able to see that across a portfolio and then drill down into details, and see the exact status anywhere of any of the deals we've initiated on the platform. Cool. And the, so going back to integration, what's the integration speed effect there for your team? Yeah. So they historically, and I probably don't need to tell you this, JV, that, banks and integrations, we want them, you know, rock solid. So we're going to test multiple iterations. We're gonna have all kinds of, you know, permutations and endpoints. We're gonna do disaster recovery on those endpoints and all that fun stuff. So with OutSystems, we're able to create a pattern. Right? So we had a, API gateway in front of all of the integrations that were API related. So it's one way for OutSystems to call that and authenticate those kind of pieces. And on the back end in the gateway, we can bring those pieces to life. That was, I wouldn't say it's a new pattern of key, but it was a pattern that wealth, systems hadn't seen. And so now all of a sudden, we have a repeatable kind of pattern, and we noticed that we could, after the first couple of these integrations, predict them in a timeline much more accurately than what teams were estimating initially it would take. So now all of a sudden, we got confidence, what used to take six months, we're running in parallel. And so it really from a from a maintenance perspective, it became the dream because we have the same pattern, the same logging, those kind of activities happen. Now, I'll even throw out one thing that I I love about OutSystems. I've created a lot of web applications over the years at KeyBank. And it always seemed like I would get a call in the middle of the night or a weekend that, hey, some browser rolled out. There's an incompatibility. So great that you have this nice integration. No one can access it because the screen won't load. And so now all of a sudden you're, you know, in a rush to, you know, fix that screen. Without system, you guys render the page, and that's your responsibility. And so for the last, oh, it's been three years, I have not got a single call on a browser incompatibility. You know, clients not being able to load screens. So I like how you take care of the integration, the underlying components in OutSystems, and, reduce some of those middle of the night calls and rendering issues. So thank you very much. I like that. I will send that to our marketing team, as a key message that our system helps you keep your eyes shut at night. That's a There you go. I love it. So we're gonna move to airway and and business impact because I think that's, that's also important to to chat about what was the outcome of this project, and, what was the measurable ROI and business outcome that you achieved when you started the, you know, basically, the transformation journey because it's really, like, a a huge transformation from from KeyBank. Yeah. So initially, you know, we're measuring how how long it takes to get a client onboarded, in the manual process, trying to get a baseline for all those so our results were incredibly tangible. And we've delivered a 20% reduction in overall credit cycle times and operational costs in the wealth organization, but the impact really goes beyond numbers. It it changed how we manage our business. When I think of, all of a sudden being able to see the entire portfolio, with a few clicks, our executives now have a confidence level, that they haven't had in the past. When you when you start to look at, hey. I I have a a large portfolio, very manual. Your pipeline can get a little distorted because, hey, you've got someone that's maybe reporting over two weeks or a single week, and so you there's a you spend a lot of time in normalizing. When you have a system, it's all normalized in front of you, and you can get there within clicks. So that evolution, that that was huge for our business. And now I think of, like, region specific stats, they're at our fingertips. The the way things can, you know, just jump at us and we can ramp up or ramp down in a particular area or a particular activity, particular product. We always had that inclination. We could see that, but not in real time. So that's definitely, you know, moved us, you know, dramatically in the market or or the perception. This isn't about operational savings necessarily, but it's definitely providing executive level insights to better serve our clients. Yeah. That's, that's quite powerful, of a of a story. Deep integration to legacy system or even being of, key processes, new UI, automation. So the question I'm gonna ask now because you know what's next. Right? Everybody is talking about AI. So what do you how do you think about AI now that you have, like, a scaffolding, like, a for new banking experience? What do you think about AI next? Yeah. So, hey, lots of thoughts on AI, some very tangible things, some next steps that we're looking at. So when I think of, hey, a lot of our in integrations are API based. I I don't think you can have a conversation nowadays without saying AgenTek AI. Right? So, looking at shifting some of our APIs to agents. And when I think of integrating with agents, I also think OutSystems has an outstanding orchestration layer to connect to other existing agents that we might build. So that shift, it it's minimal, and we get a lot of impact in being able to agent identify some of these processes, right, and the flexibility that it creates. So I see, like, specialized agents. We've I've mentioned OFAC checks and know your your, you know, customer kind of compliance activities. I think those are are places where people will head. I also think of just pure tech plays too. Agents monitoring, the activity of websites and making sure that things are functioning correctly. Maybe not necessarily, like, just logging in the servers up, but is the business functionality correct? And then I also think of, you know, just the stage for the future where scale could be much, much bigger and then, you know, clients that onboard faster, maybe there's some rush times and things like that. Or hey, just gonna put it out there that when a portfolio changes dramatically, like, you you buy or sell a portfolio, now there's a bunch of activities. It does feel like we're prepped with that with Account Central and some of the agentic layers that the automation and, that automation will allow and OutSystems will be the, able to orchestrate that. Thanks, Mike. Yeah. We are we are delighted to have worked on this project with you, and, I will look forward for our next webinar with you to talk about agentification and, and more application on on Outsystem. I think we are done with our chat. Mike, I will, let you, take it away. Excellent. Excellent. Thank you. It's it's it's really rare to see a a transformation of this scale happen in such a short window. So really fascinating to hear how it all unfolded. Appreciate your time here, both of you. Really and and so everyone in our audience, as we conclude, we wanted to offer a direct next step of you. I'm gonna just share a, little bit of a poll here that, is gonna pop up. There we go. And, as you can see, if you would like to schedule a one on one strategy session with OutSystems banking expert, we'd like to hear about that now. So if you're looking for a deeper dive into how OutSystems can help your organization modernize its core processes or accelerate your own automation strategy, please select yes to be set up with a consultation. If you aren't ready for a meeting yet, you select the section option the second option to receive the the latest OutSystems banking resources. So I'll just pause a moment, let everybody weigh in on that. So thank you for that. Appreciate you weighing in on that poll and appreciate your time here today. I think, just just a quick reminder that if you've got asked a question, we'll definitely be following up after the program. So thanks for putting those questions in there. And with that, I will officially wrap it up. Wish everyone a wonderful rest of the day and I hope you'll join us again here very soon. Thanks so much.